FeedBurner Starting To Fly Google’s Flag

Almost 11 months ago, Google announced its acquisition of FeedBurner.  Now, FeedBurner finally seems ready to make some aesthetic changes and more serious overhauls.

 Steve Olechowski

Steve Olechowski, the cofounder and COO of FeedBurner, wrote of things that will affect "selected publishers" in a note on the official FeedBurner blog.  One difference is that the first people to be affected by the rollout will be able to sign in with their Google account info.  Okay, so you’re not wildly applauding yet.
Another adjustment is getting some genuinely strong reactions on the opposite end of the spectrum, though, and that’s the planned integration of AdSense.  Allen Stern observed, "The FeedBurner ad network was one of my absolute favorites over the past year – the CPMs were very high and the ad quality was exceptional.
He then continued, "Looks like the program will probably go bye-bye, replaced with the lovely tiny text ads that only pay on a click or worse, an acquisition.  Over time what this will mean is that RSS feeds might become cluttered just like Web sites and the quality of ads will be lowered."
The way in which Google and FeedBurner handle this will have a huge impact on users’ (and advertisers’) responses, of course; opt-out buttons or especially well-targeted ads could smooth everything over.  Unrelated changes are supposedly in the works, too, so users will have some incentive to stick around and see the final product.